


we could break a silver lining

by missymeggins



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-07 21:19:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14089884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missymeggins/pseuds/missymeggins
Summary: Like being caught in an ocean rip, it scares her to let herself drift but it costs her less than fighting it.





	we could break a silver lining

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anotherthief](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anotherthief/gifts).



She hates how easy it is to fall back into old habits with him. 

She hates how much part of her doesn’t hate it, has been yearning for it from the moment she left him despite her rational self knowing they weren’t healthy.

(What she really hates is how good it feels.)

 

 

 

It’s only a takes few days out of the hospital before she’s back on his couch. 

“Come over for dinner,” he’d said and she’d had no energy to cook for herself (or do anything for herself truth be told) and she’d thought, “What’s the harm?” 

And it is harmless really, because all he does is feed her and eventually they end up on the couch in front of the tv watching absolutely nothing and not saying a word to each other because what is there to say? The world might be ending and they’re at the centre of it like they always have been but right now there’s nothing to do but wait. 

So she figures she might as well do it on his couch because at least they don’t have to talk about it.

Except it’s too easy to let herself relax, to let the weight of existence drift away with him beside her and that should be harmless but she’s not sure that it really is. Because this is how she fell in love with him and by all quantifiable measures it ruined her life. 

(The truth is, Mulder’s presence in her life has never been harmless.)

 

 

 

There’s something about running around after a mystery with him that feels like the most natural thing in the world. It’s like breathing, the most instinctual of habits, and there’s some strange measure of comfort in it. 

But if she’s honest with herself it’s not really the kind of habit she wants to indulge in with him.

The running, the fear, the desperation - they were all such an inherent part of their relationship that it’s hard sometimes not to feel like that’s where they were most real. The X Files after all was the greater part of their relationship; it was the formative part of their relationship - but it wasn’t the best part. 

For her the best part was the quiet years. The beard years. The waking up to him and coming home to him years. 

It’s the habits they formed in that time that she misses most. 

 

 

 

She hates the way she can’t help smiling when he tells her she’s ‘adorbs’. 

She hates the way her heart clenches with fear and won’t stop even as she has a hand on his chest and he’s telling her he’s fine. 

She hates that everything that brought them together is what tore them apart. 

They were robbed of a life together by the very life they lived and she hates everything about that truth.

She hates that he still loves her and doesn’t pretend not to because it would all be so much easier if he didn’t.

 

 

 

He doesn’t deserve her. 

She knows this. 

She’s pretty sure he knows it too. She left and he’s never really tried to get her back.

(And god knows it’s not because anyone would ever describe Mulder as apathetic or unwilling to go after what he wants. But that’s always been part of the problem she supposes. Everything else - The X Files, the Truth, was alway more important to him. She came second. They came second.)

Only, he does a million little things that he always did, just the same, despite the ways time has changed them, and she knows he’s not stupid enough to think they don’t effect her. 

And he never pretends that they weren’t what they were. 

“Why do you operate so well with your hands cuffed behind your back?” she asks and she’s thinking purely in context. 

But he replies, “As if you didn’t know,” alluding to another context entirely and it’s not like she’s forgotten exactly but she makes a point not to think too much about they life they had together. He, on the contrary, seems to make it a point never to forget. 

He talks about their life together like it’s the most everyday of things and not the most important part of them. But she supposes in truth, it was both. 

(It’s the past tense of it all that hurts the most.)

She might be mad at him for it if she thought it was his way of trying to re-start them but it’s not really like that. He’s just him and he’s always been his most him with her her so this is just how it is. 

And it makes her ache a little. 

 

 

 

(He doesn’t deserve her. 

But it doesn’t stop her from wanting him. 

Only him.)

 

 

 

So she ends up back on his couch again because it’s the easiest place to be and she wonders if happiness is about letting easy take you wherever you’re supposed to be. 

Like being caught in an ocean rip, it scares her to let herself drift but it costs her less than fighting it. 

And if it takes her back to him - to them - who is she to argue?

 

 

 

A week later the current pulls her to a motel room with him and it’s been so long and so much has changed but it still makes her acutely aware of the empty space in her bed and the holes in her life where there’s only ever been him. 

(She wonders sometimes what that truly means. She knows her family always thought that he was the reason she didn’t have all the other things a life should have: friends, partners, hobbies, normality. It would be so easy to blame him but the truth is she’s scared by the possibility that it wasn’t his fault at all. That maybe she would always have lacked those things and at least with him in her life it wasn’t as unbearable.)

And now she stares down the barrel of the gun that is time and ageing and she doesn’t want a life of absences so she asks him to hold her and he doesn’t hesitate, just opens his arms without ulterior motive. Sometimes he makes it so hard to hate him; so hard to remember why she walked away.

 

 

 

She chose to leave him once and he didn’t stop her. She’s pretty sure she could choose whatever she wanted with him and he’d accept it without question. It would be easy to just have him in her bed when she wanted and nothing more. 

(Except that it wouldn’t. Not really. She misses the more.)

It would be harder to try and rebuild what they were. 

 

 

 

Maybe happiness, she decides, is all about choosing what you can control in a world that’s mostly uncontrollable. 

There’s a moment, the two of them and a bigfoot mould of cherry jello, and she realises that the memory is best preserved, not interrogated. The here and now jello might not live up to her memory of it. She’s holding it to a standard that it can’t possibly maintain - the joys and pleasures of childhood.

And then she thinks that maybe the opposite is true where Mulder is concerned. Maybe the here and now doesn’t have to be contaminated by the past. 

She loved him and it ruined her life. 

He loved her and it was enough, until it wasn’t. 

She left and he didn’t follow. 

But somehow, here they are again. 

 

 

 

Maybe she deserves more than the life they had together and maybe he doesn’t deserve her. 

But after all the ways her life has been violated by other people’s choices she thinks she deserves a life of her own choosing now.

And maybe, in spite of it all, it’s still him.


End file.
